1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to personal communications systems, and more specifically is directed toward the delivery of short-message services.
2. Related Art
A personal communications services (PCS) system is a mobile service platform that seeks to revolutionize communications by allowing users to call people rather than customer premise equipment. In other words, a PCS subscriber is reachable at a single number regardless of the PCS subscriber's location within the PCS network. Achieving this flexibility requires an intelligent network that can recognize a location of a subscriber and subsequently route a particular communication service to that location.
A PCS system is generally defined independent of a particular communication service. The communications services supported by PCS include paging, residential cordless telephony, data broadcasting, cellular telephony, mobile data, etc. Customers can subscribe to one or more of these services based upon their individual preferences. These individual preferences should also be recognized by the intelligent network.
The key to success of PCS is the ability to offer a variety of services with different characteristics and different tariff structures. One example is the short-message service. Short-message service is a feature that provides for delivery of up to 160 characters to and from a mobile subscriber. This messaging feature can provide a powerful complement to the high-quality voice mobile service. Numerous applications of the short-message service can be envisioned. Accordingly, what is needed is a short-message service that can be selectively enabled based upon a subscriber's choice of one of a plurality of unbundled short-message service applications.